Maou had been personally involved with the Western Island’s leaders, and with Ashiya’s Eastern Island connections, many people from that continent had also joined the army. For similar reasons, Hazel Rumack, head of Saint Aile’s palace guard and general commander of the Federated Order, would never want Albert Ende and Emeralda Etuva, the Hero’s closest friends, on the Central Continent without good reason. Add the elite troops from the Eastern Island’s Knights of the Eight Scarves, and the whole area was already sticking out like a sore thumb.
At the moment, the Eastern and Western Islands were in deliberations, seeking common ground over the East’s meddling in the Central Continent. The Northern and Southern Islands, alongside the numerous smaller nations on the Western one, believed in that pretext—but to avoid attracting curious eyes, Rumack, Albert, Emeralda, and the Eastern knight leaders had taken pains to rotate their schedules, making sure their stays in the Central Continent didn’t overlap too closely with one another.
After all, besides the crossplanetary travelers in Suzuno and Emeralda’s party, the only people from the East who were in on the story were the Azure Emperor and a handful of generals among the Eight Great Scarves forces who served him. In the Western lands, that group consisted of the palace guards under Rumack, the sorcerers in the Holy Magic Administrative Institute, and a few clerics with the Reconciliation Panel; it didn’t include the leader or crown prince of Saint Aile, or any of the Six Archbishops, who wielded decision-making power in the Church. The Northern and Southern Islands, meanwhile, were completely out of the loop.
In this situation, having someone like Emi (whose face was too well-known) or Maou (who’d have hordes of demons falling to their knees in supplication whenever he passed by) hanging out there would simply get in the way. As Suzuno Kamazuki, chief logistics lady at the site and a woman who had clout with the East, the West, humans, and demons, put it: “I will call for you when I need you. Until then, live in Japan as you always do. Chiho has college examinations awaiting her next year; this is a vital time for her. To a high school senior, a round trip of one hour and twenty minutes is nothing to sniff at. We cannot afford to make her travel away from her school and her job too frequently. I will not demand she stop visiting, but as it was in Room 201, there is a certain line that needs to be maintained. Plus…”
She gave Maou a smile, one that seemed to chide him despite the gloomy air surrounding it.
“I am sure you being in Japan would help calm Chiho.”
Maou wanted to say a lot about that but couldn’t find the words to counter her. He was, at first, reluctant to have Chiho come to Ente Isla to back him and Emi up. She was certainly involved with Ente Isla now, of course, but Chiho lacked the strength to fight, and the idea of taking a high school teen to a battle that could decide the fate of worlds filled him with anxiety. What surprised him, though, was how no one was against Chiho making the trip. If anything, they welcomed her.
“I wanted to have her come here sooner or later!” Emi effused.
“Indeed,” Suzuno replied. “I was hoping I could give her a tour of my hometown.”
“If we have the tiiime, she simply muuust see the imperial seat of Saint Aiiile, too…”
Ashiya, standing alongside Urushihara, shrugged. “Well, why not? Apart from the angels, there is no one on Ente Isla who would wish harm upon her. As long as she doesn’t stray too far from Devil’s Castle, we and the Malebranche can keep her safe enough.”
“Yeah, what’s the big deal, dude?” Urushihara chimed in. “It’s not like Chiho Sasaki’s stupid or anything. If we tell her Don’t go anywhere dangerous, she’d be smart enough to follow that.”
In fact, it turned out that Maou had nothing to worry about. Once he’d brought the Earthling to Ente Isla, Hazel Rumack had made sure Chiho always had a guard with her—a suggestion from Emeralda, perhaps. Even Farfarello was eager to bodyguard her, for reasons that Maou assumed he hadn’t been around to witness. In a way, all this attention almost made Chiho a tad uncomfortable. Plus, in the end, Emi’s need to keep her identity on the down-low meant she was often working alongside Chiho anyway. The girl didn’t have just an iron wall of protection; it was more like a full-on fallout shelter.
By this time, Chiho had fallen into a regular routine—crossing worlds via Room 201 with some food and other provisions; chatting with the demons and humans she was close with, then returning to Sasazuka before it grew too late. It was really Maou who had problems to deal with. The main one: that forty-minute-long journey each way that Suzuno mentioned. With Maou’s current living situation, it was a pretty big burden.
“Maybe I better head back for today… My shift ends at six…but, ah, if I go to the bathhouse and stuff, it could wind up being more like nine…”
Emi had always been living by herself in Eifukucho, as did Suzuno in Room 202. But Maou had roomed with Ashiya since the very start, splitting up chore duties in Japan under a system designed with perfect precision by Ashiya. At the moment, Ashiya was busy leading the demons and Eight Great Scarves knights in Ente Isla, and his base of operations was there anyway, so if Maou wanted any domestic contribution from him, he’d have to travel to his apartment from work, then take the forty-minute journey across the Gate. With as many acquaintances around Sasazuka as he had now, Maou couldn’t say who might see him if he opened a Gate in the middle of town instead of returning home first.
This made Maou’s schedule maddeningly complex. The journey between his job at the MgRonald near Hatagaya Station and Villa Rosa Sasazuka was five or six minutes by bike, fifteen on foot—fairly close, and Maou structured his work shifts to take advantage of this. It let him pull off power moves like back-to-back closing and opening shifts. But when another forty minutes of commuting was added to this, then suddenly, the schedule turned into a gauntlet.
If Maou was closing at MgRonald, the absolute earliest he could reach his apartment was twelve forty at night. If he went on a Gate cruise, he’d be at Ente Isla at one twenty AM Japan time—and presuming he ate dinner and so on, he’d likely get to sleep around two. But if he was opening the next day, he had to be at MgRonald no later than six thirty. It meant he’d have to sleep at two, then wake up at five if he wanted time to eat breakfast and make the long Gate crossing. What’s worse, being a demon (which he was, regardless of whatever human form he took on Earth), he couldn’t rely on an angel’s feather pen to open a Gate, like Chiho and Rika could. If that feather pen allowed them a first-class bullet-train seat to Ente Isla, Maou had to take the highway route on a rickety old beater car—and much like driving a car, he had to stay alert while the Gate spell was active. No napping was possible on the way.
So basically, there were dates on Maou’s schedule that made it all but impossible to return to Ente Isla between shifts. On nights like those, if he wanted to eat dinner, he’d have to use the MgRonald employee discount, grab something from the twenty-four-hour convenience store, or use the few cooking tools that hadn’t been taken to Ente Isla and attempt to cobble something together.
“I’ve got so much laundry to do…” Maou sized up the pile of clothes on the floor, then he checked the clock as he recalled the current contents of his wallet. “Crap. I don’t want to waste the money, but I guess I gotta hit the Laundromat…”
Ashiya’s absence didn’t just affect his daily habits; it made every chore impossible to organize.
Maou had planned to clean when the place screamed for it, but since work and Ente Isla came first, it wasn’t long before a fine layer of dust had settled on the bathroom floor, the windowsills, and the spaces between the kitchen’s wood paneling. Thanks to his long shifts, it was hard to find the time to dry the laundry at home, too, so he had come to rely on the dryers at the Laundromat once the pile grew impossible to tame.
He knew from his early days in Japan that this was a decadent luxury; he could practically hear Ashiya admonishing him with every 100-yen coin he tossed into the dryer.
Emi, his rival, was
less of a threat now. No human or angel could best him, and he had fully regained his demonic force. To Satan, the Devil King, the world was his oyster—but to Sadao Maou, the human being, life felt oppressively constricted.
But what was Chiho doing? Chiho, a girl he figured would help out on the food and cleaning front? Maou had actually forbidden her from hanging out at Room 201, apart from when she used the Gate. The reason, of course, was that Maou’s residence was a literal man cave.
Chiho had become a frequent visitor, motivated by her feelings for Maou, after Urushihara and Suzuno moved in. To her, Room 201 was not just Maou’s home, but also the place where a lot of her friends hung out, which was the main reason she was there all the time. Now that it was Maou and Maou alone, things were different. Room 201 had always been an entirely male domain, but Suzuno had been right next door, and the paper-thin walls ensured she could hear everything. Now, however, Maou was usually the only person in the entire building—and having a teenager in a high school uniform regularly visiting a part-timer living alone in his crappy apartment was not really something modern society would smile upon. She had, in fact, already been called to task about this, based on the sensibilities that ruled in modern Japan.
Thus, whenever Maou was forced to let Chiho head to Ente Isla, he established the rather mean-spirited condition that the two of them should never be alone together in Room 201. If she had to use a Gate, she could either work with Suzuno and Emi to make one in Villa Rosa Sasazuka or do it in her own room instead. This exasperated their friend circle—why that attitude, at this point?—but Maou doubled down on it, and Chiho had meekly accepted it.
“I guess it’s important, huh? Making…distinctions like that.”
The statement, delivered with a straightforward smile, gave Maou a guilty conscience—perhaps because he never got around to making the “distinctions” he should have made a long time ago.
Still, it wasn’t like he was totally cut off from Ashiya, Urushihara, Suzuno, Nord, or Laila. Ashiya had too many responsibilities to come home very easily, but Suzuno and Urushihara swapped taking trips back to Earth every two or three days. She had even begun setting up a vegetable garden in the backyard, when he wasn’t paying attention. Suzuno or Nord would also come home to babysit Alas Ramus whenever Emi—now a prime contributor to MgRonald at Hatagaya, despite cutting down her hours a bit—had a particularly long shift.
But despite that, Maou was now facing many more days than before where he never talked to anyone outside the restaurant. It made him realize all the more exactly how blessed he had been, with all the kindness his friends gave him.
And so morning came, about a month into this new life of living alone, incomparably quieter and more barren than his life before.
“Maou! Maou! Heeyyyy!!”
“…” Maou winced at the merciless knocking on the front door, cursing it in his mind.
“You are going to the training again in afternoon, no? Starting when?!”
“…I’m working through the lunch rush, so one PM.”
He had half muttered the words, but the woman on the other side had superhearing at times like these.
“Yahoo! If I ask Mikitty for early lunch, I have enough time! Today, I go to new all-you-can-eat restaurant!”
“…Yeah, great.”
“See ya!”
The presence in the hallway loudly drifted off, never getting to see how badly Maou twisted up his face.
“I seriously wanna punch the dude who created this whole ‘latent force’ system.”
Thanks to assorted circumstances, there was one person who still loomed just as large in Maou’s life—Acieth Alla, a woman who didn’t have the words modesty or concern in her dictionary. He could imagine her briskly smiling, imagining the culinary delights waiting at this new eatery. He hadn’t eaten anything yet, but his stomach already felt heavy.
Upon finishing his MgRonald shift at one, Maou took the Keio Line to Shinjuku, in the heart of Tokyo. As he walked to the site for his full-time staffer training, he spoke up to Acieth, who was fused back inside him.
“So how was the all-you-can-eat place?”
“Huh? You will take me to it again?”
Maou still had trouble grappling with Acieth’s leaps in logic. It was usually Miki Shiba, landlord of the Villa Rosa Sasazuka he stayed at, who took her around—why was it “again” for him?
“…”
“Just kidding! Come on, I am just the kidding! Maou! You need broader heart!”
Acieth must have picked up on how frayed his heart was, because she tried (and failed) to make up for her words quicker than usual. She was, after all, one of the biggest reasons why he couldn’t keep a broader heart. She was as gluttonous as always, she never demonstrated a care in the world about him, she didn’t try to hide her conniving side, and it was impossible to tell what she’d do next.
Waging this god-slaying battle to make Alas Ramus’s dream come true was a good thing for Acieth as well, being Alas Ramus’s younger sister. But Maou was stressed out. If it was Acieth who had crashed into his yard in that golden apple instead of Alas Ramus, he doubted he’d ever have adopted a father-daughter relationship with her, much less accept Laila’s plea. Apart from their faces, there was nothing alike about the two sisters.
“So you know, the restaurant, it was mainly about the meats.”
“An all-you-can-eat meat deal? Wait, did you go to a yakiniku place for lunch?”
Fused like this, Acieth’s voice could be heard only in Maou’s mind and to nobody else. Maou, meanwhile, had to actually speak to get his words across, so an impartial observer could marvel at the disturbing sight of a young man in business attire mumbling incoherently to himself.
Maou’s face had taken on a dour look as of late, besides. If he didn’t have his phone to his ear like he did now, pretending to talk to someone, he’d likely be put in a facility long before the police got involved.
“Uh-uh. The all-you-can-eat yakiniku near us, they say I eat too much. They ban me.”
“Seriously?”
Maou wasn’t aware of this, but whenever Acieth joined Amane Ohguro (her usual caretaker at the moment) at a place like that, the manager would usually have to intervene once she started treating it like an eating contest on TV. If someone with Acieth’s voracious appetite went all-out at a yakiniku, Maou couldn’t blame the place for booting her.
“Mostly, they have big metal skillet, and they cook the steak and the sirloin. If you pay more, then drinks and salads and soups and curries and desserts, they are all free.”
“Wow, not only drinks and soups but all that, too? That’s brave of them. Do they give you any rice?”
“Oh, yes! All-you-can-eat rice.”
“Huh. Remember the name of the place?”
“The name? Um, what was it? It was maybe Big Guy? Or Giant Boy? …But why you ask so sudden? Normally, when I eat, you say, ‘Oh, it is the bad manners, it is bad for wallet.’”
“Just one second.”
Maou lowered his phone and used it to search for the place Acieth mentioned, relying on her vague memory of the all-you-can-eat curry location for his keywords. He found the chain restaurant in short order.
“Oh, here? So if you pay extra, you get free drinks and an all-you-can-eat buffet for salad, the soup of the day, curry, and desserts. Hmm… Too bad. I like the price, but this is more a diner than anything.”
“What is it you mean?”
“A few people in my training program are talking about a get-together sometime soon. We haven’t settled on a date yet, but we’re starting to toss candidates for a location around, so I’m looking for places we can go to.”
“Eww.” Acieth sounded disgusted. “Too much work. A get-together like that, it is all Oh, pour beer for boss, Oh, let boss berate you in front of friend, Oh, let coworkers who are only good at the sucking-up-to-boss run all over you, then Oh, blackout on the sake you can’t drink, and then coworker says Oh, you are the wimp the next
day, yes? It is the waste of precious time, yes?”
“Where did you take all that from?” Maou shook his head, the pace of his walk slowing down. “Stop sounding like Urushihara if you don’t even know what you’re talking about. Get-togethers like this, you never know how they might help you out down the line. I might wind up sharing office space with some of these guys later on, so unless you wanna get on their bad side, it never hurts to hang out and have a drink.”
“It is what you say, but you are not so, ah, enthusiastic, yes?”
“…I’ll partly admit that.”
It was rare to hear Maou sound unmotivated about work. He knew that, in this fused state, Acieth could partially pick up on what he felt, although it wasn’t some kind of full-on telepathy trick.
“I mean, you see lots of different trainees attend these classes. You got people with customer-facing jobs like me, you have people from the bun manufacturing plants, you got hires from other companies, and you got brand-new guys brought on to lead new locations, which means I have to do a bunch of on-location training, even though I know it by heart. So we’re all talking about going out some evening.”
“Hmm.”
“And I do want to talk to people from our rival chains and the processing plants. One of ’em used to serve in the Japan Self-Defense Forces, and he’s still young, but I’m kinda curious about what his life’s been like. But… I dunno. I think this get-together isn’t gonna work like that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the guy who suggested it is this dude in his midtwenties, from a region the Hatagaya location isn’t part of, and it’s like…he’s not really hiding it, you know?”
“No? You are being the not very specific. It is strange.”
“I mean, you can tell he’s aching for a fast-track career. He’s always one of the first to speak up in when working in a group. It’s like he wants to lead, and everyone else needs to follow. And he suggested this meetup, too, even though we’ve only shared a classroom a few times and the attendee list changes a lot. I guess what I’m saying is…for all the bark he gives you, there’s not a lot of bite, you know?”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 16 Page 2
